Traumatic Testimonies and the Redemption of Racial Memory in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon

The strong nexus between memory and Caribbean literature is linked to the testimony of their past collective experiences. A close reading of Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1999) and The Long Song (2010) reveals significant correspondences between the collective slave experiences of the Afro-Caribbeans and the individual experiences of their descendants in the contemporaneity. Such experiential reverberation informs on the reality of racial memory; a broad term that captures an individual’s racial heritage. It can also be construed as a signification for repressed identities and repressed fulfilments of a group of people. Studies within this intellectual spectrum have served to preserve and propagate the memory of trauma that accompanied the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Plantation experience. Memory is expressed through testimonies which evoke control over past experiences and its associated trauma. This paper argues that collective healing and redemption can be achieved through deliberate testimonies. Hinged on Carl Jung’s psychoanalysis, the study examines how traumatic pasts influence writing which often initiates a healthy expression of collective repressed fulfilments. This paper foregrounds the roles deliberate testimonies play in asserting the legitimacy of racial memory in reclaiming the sanity of a repressed race and in the liberation of the self.